The company I launched in April of last year failed. No startup post-mortem here, it just flat out failed before it even really got going. C’est la vie. I learned a ton in these 8+ months, and I’m sure with some perspective I’ll realize I learned a lot more than I feel now.
Being a first-time entrepreneur without any real savings or a trust fund from mom and dad, I need to find a job. Like immediately. No vacation to unwind and clear my mind, on to the next one.
I launched a web app in July called Dewey which sought to be social marketer’s Twitter Card buddy. It let users build optimized Twitter Cards through forms and image/video uploads instead of writing meta tags into a linked site.
It also let users set up Dewey as the Data or Destination URL for Lead Generation cards, turning the Lead Gen card into a giveaway, a sweepstakes, or even an acquisition for Instagram or Youtube followers via an Oauth and follow flow.
I signed up some solid early customers, but the analytics on Tweet expansions, and therefore card views, were far too low to warrant paying for my service. I later launched an iPhone app for music discovery, but it was a failed pivot, leaving me looking for a job.
Having worked so much with Twitter Cards and Ads, and as a user loving Twitter more than any other app or service, I put Twitter on my short list of companies I might like to work for. What follows is an account of how I used a neat little hack to make sure the fine folks at Twitter knew I might like to work there, leading to conversations with Twitter recruiters working towards an interview to #JoinTheFlock.
Using Twitter Ads custom audiences, Twitter Lists, Twitter’s API, and Twitter’s Lead Generation Card, I ran a promoted Tweet targeted at Twitter employees advertising my candidacy.
Custom Audiences — Takes Some Effort, but Incredibly Powerful
Launched back in Spring of 2013, Twitter’s Custom (sometimes called Tailored) Audiences product allows marketers to target a specific subset of Twitter users. The product is typically touted as a retargeting tool — through your app, website, or CRM, you’ve collected information on your users or customers or almost customers, and now you want to reengage them. Simply upload a list of Twitter usernames or IDs, and Twitter will show your promoted Tweet to only those people.
The difficult truth is that it takes some work to manage an audience or audiences. I was able to hack together a list of relevant Twitter IDs when I needed it, but the smart play is to be constantly maintaining lists of audiences of Twitter users as you engage them on the platform, and bucket them along targeting criteria relevant to your brand or product.
I knew I wanted Twitter employees to see my promoted Tweet, but I hadn’t been managing that audience. Twitter Lists, a relatively obscure Twitter feature came to the rescue here.
Twitter Lists — Ready Made Custom Audiences
Twitter Lists are simply lists of Twitter users maintained by other users. People make lists for all sorts of reasons, but it’s a veritable gold mine of Twitter IDs, manually curated against some criteria that’s usually given by the title. You can search lists, but the results are hidden under the Timelines section. A good way to find useful lists is to find a user who fits a profile of someone you might like to target, and see which Lists that user is a member of. My previous employer, @VaynerMedia, maintains a list of employees. If you’re looking to join that team, or you sell a social media marketing product or service, thats gold.
Twitter HQ maintains no such list, so I worked my way back from a few Twitter employees I knew towards lists of Twitter employees like this one. I then used the Twitter API to read members of that list and grab their user IDs and put them in a .CSV file. Using Ruby and the Twitter gem, this was incredibly simple.
Armed with an audience of about 1,000 Twitter IDs for Twitter Employees, I was ready to advertise my candidacy, but how?
Lead Gen Cards — Underutilized & Easy for Users
Twitter’s Lead Generation card allows “advertisers” (really anyone, you don’t have to promote Lead Gen cards) to collect “leads” on Twitter through an incredibly simple one button registration. It’s most often used for email subscription registration, but using Twitter’s advanced settings can make it so much more.
I used Dewey to set up a Data URL, and wrote up a cover letter email and attached my resume in PDF. That way, whenever somebody clicked the CTA button, they would be sent an email from my Gmail account with my resume as an attachment. Instead of having to download the list of “leads” from Twitter, Twitter told my app right away that I had a conversion, letting me automate the closing of the loop, firing off a personalized email as soon as the CTA is clicked, which definitely helps the open rate.
The Lead Gen card is nice in that it also shows your creative in-feed, so a nice image really helps get the job done.
The last thing to know about the Lead Gen card is Twitter’s Objective Based Campaigns. I only paid Twitter when somebody clicked the lead generation button successfully. My objective was “leads”, so I wasn’t charged for favorites, replies, retweets, or profile clicks. Well I wasn’t actually charged at all since I had a $100 ad credit lying around, but this is a big deal. I got a huge number of engagements and didn’t actually pay for any of them.
Results
The $100 “spend” got my actual resume in front of at least 14 people at Twitter as I paid $7.14 per lead (I used automatic bidding, and noticed that my Tweet ran almost exclusively at around 10pm EST). The campaign was called “brilliant” and “genius” by interested passersby on Twitter (I’m not claiming its either of these things). It caught the attention of people like @KatieS who runs Global Media at Twitter. Over 400 people clicked through to my profile, and SendGrid tells me my open rate over the period of the campaign was over 700%, so presumably my email got passed around a bit.
I’m engaged with a handful of employees at Twitter working towards figuring out what sort of position may be a good fit for which to apply. We’ll see where those conversations lead, I’m very hopeful we’ll figure something out that is a good fit for my mix of skills.
I doubt I’ll win a Clio like Alec Brownstein did with his Ad Words campaign.
I’ll close with this harsh reality:
